Friday, August 19, 2011

Competing with IBM and Oracle should be almost as much fun for HP as competing with Apple was. HP would probably be trying to acquire SAP at this point, if it weren’t worth nearly as much as HP is (market caps of ~$60B and $61B, respectively, at the moment). Update ~5 hours later: make that ~$46.7B mkt cap, for HP; see HP Dives to 6-Year Low (WSJ); perhaps SAP should buy HP…

Hearkening back to his two-decade career at SAP AG, Apotheker plans to spin off Hewlett Packard’s personal-computer business and dive deeper into business software with the $10.3 billion purchase of Autonomy Corp.

With the plans announced yesterday, Apotheker, 57, makes good on pledges to expand in cloud computing and aims to challenge Oracle and International Machines Corp. in more profitable products aimed at corporations. Business software delivered a 19 percent operating margin last quarter, more than triple the amount for the PC unit due to be jettisoned.